First, try to be something, anything, else

Then go out and buy Self-Help and read it ten times. Although they’re less cherished by the highbrow literary establishment than Birds of America, Moore’s early collections (Self-Help and Like Life) are dark and hilarious, with an innocence that was lost by the time of the later collection.

My friend CAAF and I were talking in email about Lorrie Moore earlier this week. CAAF’s a fan, too, but said in reading Birds of America, she

felt almost like Lorrie Moore had gotten too good at her craft. The stories were so exquisite and harrowing that they did me in. It was like taking someone else’s sorrow straight and I found myself postponing picking up the book again.

This reminds me that I’m still sitting on a pile of reader mail. I’ll have to post excerpts from it tonight so everybody doesn’t start to hate me.

And then, interestingly, she asked me if I had expected my genetics results to report a sizable Ashkenazi component. I had expected it, I told her, but it turns out, I’m not very much Ashkenazi. Instead, I am unexpectedly Irish. It’s all very mysterious, I confided. And that’s when everything started to get a little weird.

Alice wrote that a few years back she had ordered a genetics test. She had expected the results to report that she was Irish, but instead they uncovered that she was half Ashkenazi Jew. She figured there must have been some mistake, but all of her brothers and sisters received the same results. P, her cousin, however, did not. Alice’s cousin, P, was not Jewish and was in fact not genetically related to Alice at all.